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			<h1>Misuse of words</h1>
			<p>Common problems in speech from native English speakers that can&apos;t figure out how to speak their own language correctly</p>
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<p>When you misuse words, it makes you look stupid and/or uneducated. Please don&apos;t make the following common and idiotic mistakes. This page doesn&apos;t even deal with homonyms. If you can&apos;t figure out that the spelling &quot;they&apos;re&quot; is the one that&apos;s a contraction of the words &quot;they are&quot;, being clearly the only one of the three words to be spelled with an apostrophe, you might be beyond help. As for other homonyms, if you&apos;re unsure, look them up.</p>
<h2><abbr title="automated teller machine">ATM</abbr> machine</h2>
<p>An <abbr title="automated teller machine">ATM</abbr> is an automatic teller machine. The acronym &quot;ATM&quot; literally stands for &quot;automatic teller machine&quot;. So what then, is an &quot;<abbr title="automated teller machine">ATM</abbr> machine&quot;? Clearly, it&apos;s an &quot;automatic teller machine machine&quot;, whatever that is. Is it a machine that produces <abbr title="automated teller machine">ATM</abbr>s? Maybe. But the one thing that it most certainly <strong>*isn&apos;t*</strong> is one of those machines that allows you to deposit money into and withdraw money out of an account, because those are just <abbr title="automated teller machine">ATM</abbr>s.</p>
<h2>Black and white</h2>
<p>Black and white are two and only two colors. Neither of those colors are grey. If an image includes black, white, and grey, it&apos;s not a black and white image; it&apos;s a <strong>*greyscale*</strong> image.</p>
<h2>Could care less</h2>
<p>If you could dare less, it means that you must care. Otherwise, you&apos;d be completely unable to care less than you do now. If you mean that you don&apos;t care at all, the correct phrasing is that you <strong>*couldn&apos;t*</strong> care less. If you <strong>*couldn&apos;t*</strong> care less, it means that you don&apos;t care at all, because if you did care even in the slightest, it would be possible to care less.</p>
<h2>Did I scare you?</h2>
<p>If you scare someone, you make them fear you. If you make a sudden noise near someone and they jump, but then they&apos;re not trying to get away from you once they know what&apos;s going on, you didn&apos;t scare them. You <strong>*startled*</strong> them.</p>
<h2>Don&apos;t itch!</h2>
<p>Please don&apos;t tell people not to itch. To <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Itch">itch</a> is to experience the sensation of itchiness. People <strong>*cannot*</strong> make themselves not itch, except sometimes via <strong>*scratching*</strong>, which is the action that you&apos;re actually trying to prevent. If you don&apos;t want someone to <strong>*scratch*</strong>, then that&apos;s what you should say.</p>
<h2>Less is more</h2>
<p>Less is not more. The phrase &quot;less is more&quot; doesn&apos;t even make sense. Less may be <strong>*better*</strong>, and more may be <strong>*worse*</strong>, but less <strong>*cannot*</strong>, by definition, be more.</p>
<h2>Literally</h2>
<p>Literally means in a &quot;in a literal sense&quot;. In other words, if you say that you are literally doing something, it means that you are actually doing it and that you don&apos;t mean that as a figure of speech. For example, if you say that you&apos;re literally dying of laughter, it means that your life is actually ending because of how much that you&apos;re laughing. Is that <strong>*really*</strong> the message that you&apos;re trying to get across? My mother is a schoolteacher, and often says that the students are literally bouncing off the walls. Are they actually bashing themselves against the walls and ricocheting off? No? Then they are <strong>*figuratively*</strong> bouncing off the walls.</p>
<p>Misuse of this word has gotten so bad that in dictionaries, &quot;figuratively&quot; is now listed as one of the definitions of this word. In other words, the language has become so corrupted that a word now means its own opposite. When something means its own opposite, the word loses all value because it no longer has a useful, distinguishing meaning. Please, quit misusing this word so that we can get its meaning fixed.</p>
<h2><abbr title="personal identification number">PIN</abbr> number</h2>
<p>A <abbr title="personal identification number">PIN</abbr> is a personal identification number, so a &quot;<abbr title="personal identification number">PIN</abbr> number&quot; would be a &quot;personal identification number number&quot;. Is that some sort of meta-number that references your actual <abbr title="personal identification number">PIN</abbr>?</p>
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